What a plan holds
- Every part, with its material and grain direction
- Which face is on show
- Connectors and hardware
- A box plan with weight limits
- Assembly steps
- An inspection plan and a load rating
- Site access and the delivery slot
Sheet & Slot
A furniture factory in your area
A plan for small automated workshops that cut custom wooden furniture from sheets, box the parts and deliver them the next day.
Order custom furniture today and it arrives in eight to twelve weeks.
Almost none of that is cutting. A router gets through a sheet of plywood in ten to fifteen minutes. The weeks go to quoting, finishing and freight.
A Sheet & Slot cell removes all three. It prices from a published rate card, stocks sheets that arrive already finished, and stands a short drive from the customer.
You design the piece with an agent. The nearest cell cuts it, kits it, boxes it and brings it to your door in a booked slot, as early as tomorrow.
What follows is the plan: what a cell is, what it costs and what it earns.
One order, one day
A cell is a 400 to 600 m² unit with a roller door, one router and two or three people a shift. It cuts, sorts, kits, boxes and delivers. It never applies a finish, because coatings take days to cure.
A bookcase, two sheets
Sample timetable
Morning
- Order placed, plan checked09:00
- Nested with two other orders09:05
- Cut and labelled on the router09:40
Midday
- Parts sorted, edges sanded10:30
- Connectors fitted, kit bagged11:15
- Box cut to fit, packed, weighed12:00
Next morning
- Van leaves the cell08:00
- Delivered in the booked slot09:30
- Assembled with one tool09:45
Order to furnitureunder 25 hours
Outdoor pieces take a second, cheaper lane. They are mostly boards and slats, so durable timber is cut to length and drilled, then kitted and boxed the same way.
The plans
Parts, not machine code
A plan describes parts and leaves the cutting to the cell, for two reasons. The cell fits parts from several orders onto one sheet, which is the main lever on material cost. And plywood thickness varies by batch, so the cell measures each delivery and adjusts every slot as it cuts.
What a cell publishes
- Sheet sizes and thicknesses in stock
- About six sheet types and two outdoor timbers
- The largest and smallest part it can hold
- Tolerances it keeps
- Live capacity and the next free slot
One connector, one tool
Minimal assembly is a design rule. Each cell fits one connector system before boxing, and every piece must go together in under fifteen minutes with one tool at most.
The agent and the cell run the same checker. A plan that passes is a plan any matching cell can make.
What a cell costs
The machine at the centre is ordinary. Cabinet shops already cut one-off jobs on routers that load, label and offload their own sheets.
Cutting US dollars
- Nesting router
- 150–300k
- Loads, labels and offloads sheets by itself.
- Extraction and air
- 20–40k
- Dust collection and a compressor.
Edges and outdoor boards
- Edge sander
- 30–80k
- Eases every cut edge.
- Saw and drill
- 40–80k
- Cuts timber to length for the outdoor lane.
Kitting and boxing
- Bagger and connector press
- 20–50k
- Hardware bags, connectors fitted before packing.
- Box cutter
- about 75k
- Cuts a cardboard box to fit each kit. A used Homag unit was listed at €68,500.
Checking, handling, building
- Camera and scales
- 10–20k
- Over the outfeed and at the packing bench.
- Forklift and racking
- 30–50k
- Sheets arrive by the pallet.
- Fit-out and power
- 50–100k
- Three-phase supply, a dock for the vans.
A whole cell$400,000 to $800,000
What a cell earns
Move any figure. The sheets below are one day of work at the volume you set.
sheets and orders a day.
Profit a year
Cell profit before platform, marketing and tax, at % of revenue.
| Order price | $700 |
|---|---|
| Sheets | $240 |
| Hardware and box | $30 |
| Card fee | $21 |
| Delivery | $50 |
| People | $101 |
| Rent and other fixed costs | $50 |
| Equipment | $22 |
| Left over | $186 |
Revenue a year
Breaks even at
Equipment paid back in
Every default is an estimate made for this plan and none is a quote. People in the cell start at three and grow by one for every four daily orders unless you set the number yourself.
Who pays whom
- The customer
- Design is free. The card is authorised at order and charged when the delivery is signed off. Large orders pay a deposit.
- The cell
- Paid per plan from a published rate card: sheet area, machine minutes, handling per part, hardware, boxes and the delivery stop. Fixed prices let the agent quote on the spot.
- The trade
- Interior designers, landscape designers, cafés and fit-out firms hold accounts and pay on invoice. Their repeat orders are the baseload.
- A remake
- A damaged part is cut again and couriered alone. Whoever caused the fault pays for it.
- A benchmark
- In Opendesk's published example, a £300 desk paid £217 to the maker and £18 to the designer.
Hard questions
- Breaks even at about six orders a day
- Equipment for $400,000 to $800,000
- 400 to 600 m², two or three people a shift
Is same-day delivery real?
Only for pieces cut from prefinished sheets and ordered before late morning. The standard promise is a booked slot from tomorrow. Someone has to be home for furniture anyway, and a day's notice lets the cell fill every sheet.
What about outdoor furniture?
It runs on the second lane, in thermally modified or acetylated timber. Durability claims need weathering tests before any long warranty is offered.
Who is liable if a shelf fails?
Whoever designs and makes it, which here is one business. That is why the agent works inside furniture families that were physically load-tested, and why tall storage follows tip-over rules. Take legal advice early.
Has this been tried?
In part. Opendesk sent open designs to local workshops and quoted one to four weeks, with each maker pricing each job. Tylko sells parametric shelving made by production partners. Neither paired a fixed rate card with stocked materials and next-day local delivery.
What limits a cell?
Not the router, which can cut more than fifteen orders in a shift. The limits are the people sorting and packing, and the number of delivery slots in a day.
Could a cell cut plastic?
Yes. Recycled plastic sheet cuts on the same router, so it would be one more stocked material.
Start with thirty orders
No equipment yet. Have the agent draw plans for two or three furniture families, rent router time at a local cabinet shop, and sort, pack and deliver twenty to thirty real orders by hand. The minutes each order takes decide what to automate first.
